Traditional IT powers are betting that hosting electronic medical records will …

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Right now, healthcare is big business. It's one of the few segments of the economy that has been largely untouched by the current recession. At the same time, the steady rise in healthcare expenses has made it the target for reform efforts, and made the field a target of stimulus spending. So, it's no surprise that many companies are attempting to highlight their efforts to get a piece of the healthcare spending pie. Last Thursday, the hardware side made its play, as Intel and GE announced a new initiative that would see them join forces to develop and market healthcare monitoring devices. This week, the software companies are making sure their successes are noted, as Google and Microsoft both announced progress in their electronic medical records efforts.

First up is Google, which has a Google Health site that was opened to the public about a year ago. Although the service bears the typical beta label that characterizes many Google products, it hasn't stopped the search giant from lining up others in the healthcare business. This morning, Google announced that it has signed up another pharmacy chain, CVS, to their service. CVS is hardly the first company to sign on, but it allows Google to reach a significant milestone: over 100 million people can now access their prescription history through Google Health.

Any person with an account on one of Google's partners can navigate to their account with the pharmacy and enable sharing of information with Google. Once enabled, it's possible to import all the information into Google's health record system. Once present, Google will scan the information for any potential interactions among the prescription medicines. Users can also share them with any individuals, like doctors or family members, through the standard mechanisms provided by Google Health.

That latter feature might be as medically significant as Google's checks for interactions among prescriptions. Doctors often rely on past medical history in making diagnoses, which often runs into issues with a patient's memories of past medical events. Prescription medication history can often provide a clearer picture not only of present medical issues, but a window into past events, as well, and are far more likely to be accurate than a patient's recollection. The big limit will be that many people have filled prescriptions from a variety of providers in the past, and not all of these are likely to be present in Google's network of data sources. So, for the time being, the medical value is likely to be spotty.

For its part, Google promises to maintain the privacy of these records, and will only use anonymized and aggregated data to extract trends. The security, however, is provided by the same password that people use in their e-mail and chat client. I would suspect many people are more casual about that information than they would like to be with medical records, so this may require some mental adjustment on the user's part.

Microsoft's healthcare efforts, in contrast to Google Health, are sprawling. The functional equivalent to this program appears to be its HealthVault program, which is also proudly listed as being in beta. The company's big recent success involves providing HealthVault access to the records of a major medical institution.

The New York Timesis reporting that a major hospital, New York Presbyterian, will roll out online patient access to their records. The hospital system, formed by the merger of the teaching hospitals of Cornell and Columbia, is the first major site to take the services live. The data itself will be stored in HealthVault, and will presumably be accessible through a personal account if a user has signed up. In addition, New York Presbyterian will provide a site, myNYP.org, that provides customized access to these records.

The ability to access these records online is probably especially significant in the case of these hospitals, as large teaching hospitals often attract many cases that require specialized care, after which the patients have postoperative care elsewhere.

Overall, the announcements are serving notice that healthcare, which has been a fairly specialized marketplace, is opening up to companies that have expertise outside of the industry. At a time when many of those new entrants are facing shrinking profits within their traditional markets, these initial successes are undoubtedly a major relief.